Quantum Attention by Overlap Interference: Predicting Classical and Many-Body Quantum Sequences
Abstract
We propose a variational quantum implementation of self-attention (QSA)-the core operation in transformers and large language models-which predicts future elements of a sequence by forming overlap-weighted combinations of past data. At variance with previous approaches, our QSA realizes the required nonlinearity through interference of state overlaps and a degree-$k$ polynomial kernel, and estimates a loss based on R\'enyi-$1/2$ entropic functionals via two observables' expectation values, avoiding the decoding of amplitude-encoded predictions into classical probabilities. QSA also accommodates a constrained, trainable data-embedding tying state overlaps to data-level similarities. Its dominant end-to-end training complexity scales as $O\left(\mu^{-1}k^2Td\right)$, versus $O\left(T d^{k+1}\right)$ of the fairest classical comparison, with $\mu$ a training signal; we show numerically that this allows a complexity advantage in the regime where sequence length $T$ dominates the embedding size $d$. In simulations, our QSA-based quantum transformer learns sequence prediction on classical data and on many-body transverse-field Ising trajectories-establishing trainable attention as a practical primitive for quantum dynamical modeling.
